LIST OF PANELS

Policy scholars are increasingly applying a temporal perspective to explain policy stability and change. Temporal analysis has a strong focus on the timing and sequence of policy events in order to identify the dynamics of policy making. The notion of path dependency is often used to explain policy trajectories. Policy stability is explained by analysing the historical sequence of policy events in order to establish the self-reinforcing mechanisms maintaining the policy path. As the sequence of events develops over time, driven by internal dynamics, policy development may increasingly be out of synch with the broader political or institutional context. The result is to trigger a critical juncture, enabling rapid and radical policy change. In contrast to this path dependency/punctuated equilibrium model of policy development and change, recent theoretical developments suggest that policy trajectories tend to be characterised by gradual policy transformation. This second literature has focused on mapping different types of gradual change and identifying the dynamics behind reform processes.  An alternative, but related, approach to explaining gradual policy evolution over time is reactive, or process, sequencing. It focuses on the temporal and causal connections between policy events which are produced by reactions and counter-reactions to previous events in the sequence that cause subsequent policy events. Reactive, or process, sequencing focuses on the way in which policy evolves without assuming that the sequence would be predetermined by path dependency. This panel welcomes papers which explore the recent theoretical, methodological and empirical developments in temporal policy analysis—either within the path dependency or reactive sequence formulation--with the aim of improving our understanding of policy stability, change and controversies from a temporal perspective.

The literature on path dependency is now substantial and has made important contribution to our understanding of the policy dynamics producing policy stability and to a lesser extent the way in which policy change can be understood. The switch of focus to gradual policy change raises new under-explored questions on reform dynamics. Reactive, or process, sequencing has been less frequently applied in the policy sciences, but it has significant potential to generate insight into policy evolution. The approach is still under-theorised particularly in relation to factors or mechanisms that causally connect events in a policy sequence, and methodologies for illustrating the causal connection between events in empirical analysis. There is a need to discuss and confront the different theoretical and empirical approaches to temporal policy studies. These goals are the aims of this panel.